Author Archives: Bill Hirschman

Thrilling Tap Dancing Mostly The Reason To See My One And Only

It would be facile and unfair to say the one and only reason to see the Broward Stage Door production of the musical My One and Only is the exuberant joyful tap dancing. The leading lady has a lovely voice. And the music is by the Gershwins. But otherwise, this production is what theatrical academics and professional dramaturgs technically call “a mess.”

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Challenges When West Side Story Staged By A Puerto Rican

For a director born in Puerto Rico, Marcos Santana sees West Side Story’s depiction of gang warfare between New York natives and Puerto Rican immigrants containing some aspects that don’t quite ring true for contemporary residents of the Caribbean island.

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Filmmaker Billy Corben’s Cocaine Saga Is Now A Theater Piece

It’s Wednesday, March 7, and Billy Corben’s world premiere play Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy has been in rehearsal for some time with Miami New Drama. It opens the next day for a week of audience previews and script tweaking at the Colony Theatre.

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Next Fall At Outre: How Can A Gay Couple Cope When One Has Faith, The Other Agnostic

Theater does not have to be loud and careening to be memorable. Outré Theatre Company’s revival of the off-Broadway hit Next Fall courageously takes a huge chance staging this evening of emotion and ideas slowly and quietly.

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Miami Soprano Cuervo Takes On Challenging Role Of Frida Kahlo

Miami-based, Colombian-born soprano Catalina Cuervo is best known for portraying Maria in Piazzolla’s Maria de Buenos Aires — more than 50 times. But since 2015, she has been forging a similar bond with iconic Mexican painter Frida Kahlo in Robert Xavier Rodriguez’s 1991 piece Frida which she will play this month for Florida Grand Opera

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Pigs Do Fly’s ‘2 Across’: Strangers On A Train Of A Different Sort

Pigs Do Fly’s production of 2 Across is the story of two radically different but similarly lonely neurotic urbanites who meet on a pre-dawn San Francisco commuter train. They start as strangers on a train, but you can see the improbable inevitable bonding coming numerous stations ahead, no matter how seemingly incompatible they are in temperament.

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Charlie Brown & Friends Still Sing For All Of Us At Slow Burn

Charlie Brown is 68 years old, but as the musical You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown has proven year after year, Schulz’s offspring remains ageless. Slow Burn Theatre Company’s penny bright power plant production reaffirms Schulz’s vision that the joys and fears, pleasures and disappointments of childhood remain secreted deep inside our adult exteriors.

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Ambitious ‘Promises, Promises’ Still Makes Good On Some

Ambitious is the word for the Levis JCC production of the musical Promises, Promises. Sometimes the commitment by everyone involved to make the show work helps it stay aloft, and, other times, it isn’t enough to make this funny, yet dated, piece rise to any occasion.

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Thought-Provoking Doll’s House Part 2 Examines Marriage

There was no standing ovation for A Doll’s House Part 2 at Maltz Jupiter Theatre from an audience which had stood for Mamma Mia! It’s not that the incisive production didn’t deserve accolades; likely the merciless dissection of the institution of marriage resonated too close to home for many to avoid thought-provoking self-examination.

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‘Race’ Is Vital, Engrossing Theater At Main Street Players

In Main Street Players’ riveting, unmissable mounting of David Mamet’s scorching play, Race, director Lowell Williams wastes no time in hammering us with a sadly telling stage picture.

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